According to Nielsen, there are reportedly 57.3 million mobile users in the United States. And as Jessica Tsai reported earlier last month,  two-thirds of today’s companies have expressed the intent to deploy mobile applications to extend business operations.  Given those statistics, the future of mobile is now.

For those reasons and to expand its reach in the collaboration software market, enterprise 2.0 vendor Socialtext has released a new version of its mobile software. The company, perhaps best known for bringing Twitter-like status functionality to the enterprise, is now allowing customers to access its collaboration software via the Web on their smartphones. According to Socialtext President, Chairman, and Co-founder Ross Mayfield (a recent recipient of CRM Magazine’s 2009 Influential Leader award), the Socialtext Mobile platform capitalizes on the following capabilities:

1. Microblogging,
2. Activity Streams,
3. Social Networking, and
4. Collaboration with content through Workspaces.

Socialtext Mobile is available for all customers at no extra cost. “In terms of mobile design, it’s making the choices of what not to include, make it simple yet effective and how do you make sure you’ve done a  mobile application that’s designed for speed and for the different usage patterns that people have,” Mayfield says. He adds that the decision to host the application via the Web made a lot more sense. For users running the application behind the firewall, they have the ability to leverage Motoroloa’s Good Mobile Connection to provide additional secure transport to the Socialtext software.

With its Free 50! promotion, Socialtext is offering a free trial version of its software online for up to 50 users. Those who sign up will also be able to log into Socialtext Mobile without cost.

By Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal, Beagle Research Group

Salesforce.com announced a contact management solution today specifically targeting the smallest businesses, nearly a decade after that product might have been a logical initial offering. Instead, the company started as a bare-bones sales force automation (SFA) provider at the turn of the century, a time when premises-based, standalone SFA had become not only commonplace but, in some cases, a high-end alternative to contact management products such as Act! and Goldmine.

Today’s announcement covers a base that Salesforce.com intentionally left open while building itself up from an SFA-only application to a full CRM suite and, eventually, a cloud-computing platform provider. Today’s announcement says, in part, that Salesforce.com’s Contact Manager Edition is for single- or two-user situations where full CRM — or even just full SFA — would be overkill. You can expect many entrepreneurs and small-business people to take advantage of the new offering as an alternative to the still-available contact management applications as well as the more-general-purpose tools such as Microsoft Outlook.

A contact manager tracks names and demographic data as well as deal information. For a long time, many businesspeople who had not made use of contact managers per se made do with electronic Rolodexes built into the operating or email systems of their PCs or Macintoshes. But in an increasingly mobile world in which people expect to carry and access increasing amounts of data and functionality on portable devices, purely PC-based applications are filling a diminishing percentage of the market’s needs.

With Salesforce Contact Manager Edition, users no longer have to choose between PC functionality/portability and the constant need to synchronize devices. Because the Contact Manager Edition is a cloud-computing application, it’s accessible via most Internet browsers — including the mobile browsers designed for small-screen smartphones.

Finally, at a single-digit dollar fee per seat per month — $9 to be exact — Salesforce.com has broken through a price barrier that had kept the contact management software niche relatively secure. Now, Salesforce Contact Manager Edition is easily competitive with other contact managers.

In the end, this announcement is more of a product-line extension than a technological breakthrough. Selling Salesforce.com’s applications at a lower price point has always been possible, obviously. [Editors' Note: In fact, Salesforce.com had been testing a "Group Edition" for "1, 3, or 5 users" at the $9/user/month price point for some time; that offer expired on Aug. 31.]

The company has simply developed the necessary packaging and policies, and the imposed limit of two seats conservatively guards against cannibalizing the existing Salesforce.com customer base.

Salesforce.com will make money even at this price point because the incremental cost of adding a seat is nugatory. But Salesforce Contact Manager Edition will not likely alter the company’s balance sheet even if the number of subscriptions reaches the level attained by über-contact-manager–supplier Sage, which has nearly three million copies of Act! under service contract. Salesforce.com is too big — and the Contact Manager Edition’s fees are so small — that the company’s overall numbers will hardly budge.

However, the Contact Manager Edition, which Salesforce.com says is due to be available in October, is the company’s way of covering a base and at the same time protecting its flank from companies such as Sage, whose Act! Contact Manager has evolved to support large workgroups in the last few years. [Editors' Note: Sage released its Act! 2010 edition on Tuesday, Sept. 1.]

From what I’m told, this was the first in a series of Salesforce.com revelations slated for the balance of the year. Additional announcements will appear over the coming weeks, followed by an expected flurry during the company’s annual Dreamforce event in November.

Denis Pombriant, a CRM magazine columnist, is the founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group, a CRM market research firm and consultancy. He often guest-blogs with us at destinationCRMblog.com, but his own blog can be found here. He can be reached at denis@beagleresearch.com, or on Twitter (@denispombriant).

I received an email invitation today to a view a recorded Webinar about mobile commerce hosted by  San Diego-based cross-channel commerce solutions provider Escalate Retail. The Webinar, “m-Commerce: The Gateway to Buy Anywhere, Fulfill Anywhere Commerce,” demonstrates how retailers are able to enhance the consumer shopping experience by incorporating the mobile channel (You can listen to the recorded Webinar here, free with registration.). Mobile commerce is already highly popularized in Europe and Asia. Why North America is slow to adopt is anyone’s guess — excuses are certainly running out, especially now that there are 68 million smartphone subscribers, a rate that’s growing 80 percent annually, Escalate reports.

According to Escalate Retail,the cross-channel consumer is hands down your most valuable. In a survey that asked whether consumers “shop across multiple channels,” 49 percent said no while 51 percent said yes. I was pretty surprised by how close these numbers were, but I often forget that most people aren’t tied to their computers for 90 percent of their waking hours — right?

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I wrote a story for destinationCRM.com about Maximizer Software’s announcement of its Mobile CRM branding. Along with the press release, the folks at Maximizer passed along a YouTube video that demonstrates the need for accessing CRM, even on-the-go.

The video is pretty funny, and as Laurie McCabe (SMB analyst with AMI-Partners) points out, it’s a good attempt at viral marketing.

The topic of smartphones brings me back to Tim Bajarin’s keynote at the dCRM conference last week. Bajarin, who rubs elbows with Steve Jobs, says:

“These devices will represent 70 percent of all phones sold in the us by 2012. That is a huge change in thinking.”

Bajarin goes on, saying that generation Y will not even consider using a regular cell phone anymore. A phone without a text keyboard? Forget about it.

Mobile CRM makes sense. CRM is not an industry that ties its employees to desks. Sales and marketing people are often traveling and doing business whenever and wherever. Recently, I had the privilege to have dinner with a several CRM vendors, one of whom sells mobile CRM solutions for BlackBerry. At one point during the evening, the man next to him turned and said, “I need you.” He shared that all through the day at the destinationCRM exhibit hall, he was meeting people, making contacts, and taking business cards. He was frantically writing down information on the back of the business cards so that when he goes back and enters the contacts into his CRM system, he will hopefully be able to put a face to the name. However, as he told the mobile CRM guy, if he would have been able to pull up the CRM database on his BlackBerry, it could have been done in seconds.

I recently purchased a smartphone, mostly because I wanted to be able to check email on the road. I won’t share which kind of phone it is, but I will tell you that it’s not an iPhone or a BlackBerry. I have found myself, even after having the phone for about six months now, discovering new features and using it in new ways. Perhaps my favorite application is the quick access to Google Maps. [It means I don't have to bring my old fold-out map with me when trekking through new areas of the city. Basically, it allows me to still look "cool" in New York, even when I am incredibly lost and confused.]

Talks of mobile CRM has seemed to have taken conferences — and headlines — by storm. In the words of my dear colleague, Jessica Tsai, “Dude, I’m so relevant.”